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NASA Funded Study States People Could Be On the Moon By 2021 For $10 Billion
MarkWhittington writes: The Houston Chronicle reported that NextGen Space LLC has released the results of a study that suggests that if the United States were to choose to do space in some new and creative ways, American moon boots could be on the lunar surface by 2021. The cost from the authorization to the first crewed lunar landing would be just $10 billion. The study was partly funded by NASA and was reviewed by the space agency and commercial space experts.
The proposal is to put a small base near a pole, mine water, turn it into fuel, and ship it up to a Langrange point. Outbound ships can refuel on their way to Mars (manned) or elsewhere (robotic). It sounds like a reasonable reason to go to the moon.
There's also some interesting things you could do with science experiments on the moon. Lots of hard vacuum, low gravity and radio silence on the far side.
Thus, it would really cost $30Bn.
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The Moon is actually a harder test of habitat recycling. Mars has good amounts of CO2 which may be used for oxygen extraction (see the MOXIE experiment). Mars does have a minimal atmosphere (not a complete vacuum) and possibly easily accessible water ice resources.
If we can figure out how to live in orbit or on the Moon for long term, without resupply, then Mars should be a snap.
Note that they ARE working on a lot of self-sufficiency initiatives on the ISS - water recycling and such. Long term this is stuff that needs to be figured out cold for mankind to go anyplace in space. Similar initiatives on the Moon would allow use of the regolith and perhaps water ices for material needs.
We should not go to the moon every generation or so just for the glory of putting more prints in the lunar dust; we should use it as a boot camp to train to go to other, less hostile places in space.
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Define, "defensible". Because I think you're full of it.
Living on the surface of an alien planet under hostile conditions is a pretty tricky affair. Maintaining a presence on the 'dark' side of the moon so you can have even better astronomy is pretty cool. A staging area to look at working towards more of space is something we don't have now. Because we fucking well can has always been a marvelous idea.
The problems we need to solve for Mars? We can wok on those problems before having to solve a 2 year travel time with no escape plan.
So when you say "no defensible reason" I say bullshit. There's plenty we could do on the moon which actually is of value, and is entirely defensible. And which actually helps us learn about what we'd do on the surface of Mars. Or any other planetary surface.
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The average lifetime productivity of an American is about $2 million. Why should we spend 5000 lifetimes worth of productivity to go to the moon?
Well if we can spend 500,000 lifetimes worth of productivity creating the biggest fuckup in the Middle East then why not?
What good does going back to the moon do?
Other than inspire a generation's interest in math, science and engineering? Other than the dual use of much of the technology that will be developed for the space program?
Both of these things were major benefits of the original space race and you are materially benefitting from both at this very moment.
How are you going to get those spinoff benefits and discoveries without actually doing work in space, and just sitting around here and funding social programs? You're not. The Apollo program yielded enormous economic benefits for the US due to the new technologies created; those would not have happened if we just increased teacher pay.
I'm not saying social programs and teacher pay increases shouldn't be done, but if you want actual advancement in technology, you have to actually do things which require that advancement. You can't just wait until all social problems are cured. That isn't going to happen for generations.
I appreciate it's not a zero sum one-or-the-other game, but there are limited resources we've got,and while $10b may be a drop in the bucket and there is plenty of condemnable waste-- as a parent post notes, it does represent many thousands of lifetimes of american labor and value. So... we've got billions of people on this planet and immeasurable mysteries to be answered and places to be explored and problems to be solved here. I ask not as a bad-faith challenge but as an opportunity to explain to me... why send people to the moon so we can send people to mars so we can send people to (undiscovered?) less hostile places?
The short answer is this...
We have all our eggs in one basket, Earth. Should anything happen to Earth, either from stupid humans or a very large rock hitting us, our whole race could be doomed and thus all that we have done and all that we could be is pointless...
It is spreading out the risk.
Of course the money goes to corporations. Individuals that have the capacity, and capital, to pay for the design of a rocket ship capable of traveling round trip to the moon.would do so under a corporate umbrella anyway. Also, most of the money goes to infrastructure and employees. This isn't corporate welfare like giving money to oil companies that don't need it.